Posts Tagged ‘Wahoo’

Apparently, Pop Warner added three post-season games to the 1914 schedule very late in the season, quickly or while on the road or all three. The first mention of the post-season games came in the December 4 issue of The Carlisle Arrow, after the first two of these games had been played. The team likely did not return home after the Thanksgiving game with Brown because the first pot-season game was played two days later in Boston. On December 6, the Indians met Alabama Polytechnic Institute (Auburn) in a game played in Atlanta that figures prominently in Auburn folklore. It was Pop Warner’s last at Carlisle’s helm and Lone Star Dietz’s last before embarking on a career as a head coach.

Some research into student files uncovered the fact that former Carlisle end Charles Guyon, aka Wahoo, was instrumental in setting up that game. At that time, he was th Atlanta branch manager for Spalding Sporting Goods and, as such, was closely involved in athletics in that city. Unfortunately for him, the game had been set up too quickly to generate much publicity and, due to having a bad season, the Indians weren’t a big draw at that time. Guyon fronted the money for the game and lost it. Attempts to have the government refund part of it were fruitless.

The game itself was a defensive struggle. The Indians had the ball in Auburn territory much of the first quarter but failed to score. Auburn stiffened. The second and third quarters were fought to a standstill with neither team able to generate much offense, let alone score. In the final period, Auburn moved the ball with a series of line plunges followed by pass from quarterback Hairston to left end Kearly, who carried the ball to the Carlisle six-yard line. “On the next play Hairston catapulted through the Indian line for the touchdown.” Louiselle kicked the extra point. Carlisle moved the ball with a series of lateral and pass plays but fell short when a pass was intercepted.

The game lives on in Auburn folklore, not for the victory so much as for the play of a Carlisle substitute named Hawkeagle.

I just found out that, like almost everyone else interested in the Carlisle Indian School, I had been snookered. The trickster is a major figure in American Indian lore and another one has been brought to my attention. I bought the idea that Wauseka was Emil Hauser’s Cheyenne name. Now I learn that he made it up as a joke.

Pete and Emil Hauser were friends of Mike Balenti as was Albert Exendine and they visited him in his home in Oklahoma after all left Carlisle. It was during one of these visits that the joke was shared and Balenti’s son heard it. It turns out that Emil Hauser made up the name on a lark and it stuck. Knowing this raises a lot of questions, the answers for which can only be speculated.

When and where he coined his name is not known, but something is known about a similar action taken by his old teammate Charles Guyon. When Guyon and Hauser were both attending, and playing football for, Haskell Institute, Guyon would play summer baseball in the Midwest. When interviewed by one-too-many a newspaper reporter who couldn’t pronounce his Chippewa name, Charlie gave him the name of the town in which he was playing at the time, Wahoo, Nebraska. When he played at Carlisle he went by both Wahoo and Charles Guyon. In later years he was often referred to as Charlie Wahoo or Chief Wahoo.

Emil Hauser may have taken a page from his old teammate’s book and appropriated a geographic name as his own. A quick search identified towns in Illinois and Wisconsin named Wauseka and a county in Minnesota named Waseca. The truth probably won’t ever be known but this is a plausible explanation, particularly because a friend of his had previously done something similar.

One of the most difficult and time-consuming things my editor has me do is to provide players’ full names. Now James G. Sweeney, a lawyer from Goshen, New York and a 50-year West Point supporter, has requested that I help him identify a number of players. Sweeney is writing an article about the 1905 Carlisle-Army game that was approved by the War Department but can’t find players’ first names in newspaper reports. Apparently because I write about Carlisle Indian School football, he thought I’d know all the players’ names. I wish it were so.

Finding the biggest stars’ first names isn’t too difficult and, by now, I can give most of them off the top of my head, assuming that I don’t have a senior moment. Even identifying them wasn’t a piece of cake. One of the reasons for that was that some of them played under multiple names. For example, Emil Hauser was better known as Wauseka and his brother, Pete, was also a star player; Charles Guyon went by Wahoo and, to confuse things further, his younger brother, Joe, came along a few years later and made an even bigger name for himself; and William H. Dietz played as Lone Star. Linda Witmer’s The Indian Industrial School: Carlisle, Pennsylvania 1879-1918 includes a list of students that attended Carlisle. Although incomplete, it nonetheless is a useful tool. One of the problems in identifying players is that many siblings and cousins attended the school. Determining which one is the correct person is a challenge.

Carlisle Indian School publications are invaluable resources. In 1905 the school newspaper went by The Arrow. The school had no literary magazine at that time. Most of the big games were covered by The Arrow. Often articles from big-city papers were reprinted in it. From them we get our cast of characters, if only by their last names. Varsity football players were often active in the literary and debating societies because they were among the oldest on campus. Write ups of these societies’ activities often included full names. Football stars often got press for more mundane activities because they were famous. These pieces often included their first names. Players other than stars received less coverage.

Graduation coverage included full names for the graduating class and much coverage of the individuals in that class. Because most students had little proper schooling before coming to Carlisle and often at advanced ages, they were unwilling or unable to commit to lengthy courses of study that would lead to graduation.

My ace in the hole is the athletic or football (it varied) banquet. This time I hit pay dirt because the coverage of the 1905 football banquet (held in early 1906) included not only the menu for the banquet and the toasts given, but a complete roster of the players on the team with those who lettered identified with Xs. Well not exactly complete. Chauncey Archiquette’s name was omitted. Perhaps Jeffrey Powers-Beck has the reason for his omission from the list in Chief: The American Indian Integration of Baseball, 1897-1945 when he states thatArchiquette, then 28, was an 1898 Carlisle grad who had played football and other sports during his days at the school and returned as staff in 1905 but played again. This was the same Archiquette a 1953 Los Angeles Mirror article claimed was Jim Thorpe’s boyhood idol.